Bleeding The Maroon and Gold

Hey, don't get me wrong, I am a ASU homer through and through. As both student and employee for eight years I bleed Maroon and Gold, it's in my nature. Every August I anticipate the start of another football season with great expectations...hoping for another Rose Bowl excursion for my home team. It has been 18 years since I last worked at ASU, yet I still keep up my friendships and ties.

So it is with great love and respect to my Alma Mater that I make this observation:

ASU architecture, when viewed as a grouped entity...sucks.

Yeah, there are a lot of very wonderful individual buildings, but there does not seem to be any sense of cohesiveness to my untrained eye. Sometimes it seems to me like 50 College of Architecture Freshman got together and came up with the master plan. Or perhaps there was State funding to spend and someone just said..."go crazy". Because when viewed as the sum of it's parts...the architecture does not seem to have any common ground. Whereas many University campuses I have visited seem to have a sense of unification, I just don't feel that at ASU.

For a case in point. My favorite campus building is the Nelson Fine Arts Building.  I like it's stark concrete look and sharp angels very much. But it I had to guess a theme for this building, I'd have to say Eastern Germany before the fall of the wall...which is fine, but I'm not sure it fits in with all the other buildings on campus.

Ok, so compare that building  to one of the older dorm buildings on the ASU campus.

The surrounding palm trees and the high rise look make it seem like something that should be sitting along a beach in Honolulu. The V shaped windows would be something that could be theorized about in the Da Vinci Code, but what does it have to do with Tempe, or ASU, or Sun Devils...or anything remotely academic?

Now, look at the next building in our odd campus tour. This is the College of Law Library. This is just a weird looking building, like it landed in Tempe from some alien space invasion B movie. But even setting the odd architecture aside,  I believe it is the only place at ASU where planners chose desert landscaping. What could have been a strong unifying them for the landscaping at ASU...is reserved for an odd little 'boot' hill leading up to the strangest looking building on campus.

Not too far from the College of Law Building, comes the LDS Institute and the Computing Commons. Both nice looking buildings in their own right...but please tell me the common thread?



Before we end our campus tour, we can't leave without visiting Grady Gammage Auditorium. I have never been to a play or event in this building that I have not completely loved. The sound and atmosphere produced inside this building is wonderful, and I love attending events there.  The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it a very grand place to see a show.  ASU was blessed to have this building, designed by such a renown architect, on campus. Wright had strong Arizona ties, so it would not be a stretch to have a building designed by him on campus. However, the building was originally designed  for some Iraqi prince and meant to be sitting in Persia somewhere. It was not designed originally for the ASU campus. And when matched up with all the previous buildings I have shown, I just don't see any unifying theme. If ASU had used this building as the centerpiece of all the predecessor buildings, a theme could have been born that would have carried over. But it just did not happen. The final joke about this building is that when viewed from above, the building has a strong resemblance to a commode. Was Wright trying to tell the Sun Devil alumni (or the Iraqi Prince) something?

One would think that walking around a college campus should be a reflection on great academics, of the power of thought, of teaching, of homecomings and of past victories on athletic fields. I don't think ASU has been successful at establishing that type of identify. The conglomeration of buildings and landscaping does not have any type of unifying theme. I am left with the feeling that the campus was just thrown together.

Again, I have love and respect for ASU. This is just an observation, not meant to be a criticism.

Cheers, nca